 Gender diversity, working with the other 50%, so this is focused on gender, and there's of course the minority diversity as well, but this one is for gender diversity. So I'd like to start with introductions of the panel, and the question is what has your, you know, just do a quick introduction and also mention what your, what's been your experience being a woman involved in the OpenStack community. So Diane? Well, I'll start. I'm Diane Mueller. I work at Red Hat. I'm the community manager for OpenShift, which is a platform as a service that runs on top of OpenStack. So I do a lot of cross-community collaboration and work with different pieces and parts of the OpenStack community. So my personal experience is that I came in sort of with an agenda. I wanted to make sure that my product worked on top of OpenStack and have had a pretty good time working and integrating my projects into things that run on OpenStack, and felt that it's been a rather a very good opportunity to network with people within the OpenStack community, and it's been very inclusive in terms of bringing different voices into the project. But I haven't seen myself reflected in the project as a woman. So I think somebody, Monty said in the last panel that there's four queens in the deck this year of the OpenStackers, and there's four women there out of the entire time. And one of the things that I always say to people is that if you don't see yourself in the room, it's hard to validate that you should be in the room. And I have a pretty strong personality. I think there's a lot of strong personalities on this panel. And you have to get that way in order to be heard and to be seen. And I think that's one of the things, like being on this panel, is about being out and being really visible in the community. And that's one of the things I try hard to be. Hey there, I'm Nikki Acosta. I once upon a time, I was with Rackspace. Back when OpenStack was just being founded, part of that early team, left to MetaCloud about, I don't know, a few months ago. Was there a whopping three months before we were acquired by Cisco? And I think this is like our, I don't know, our sixth summit or something. And, you know, on one hand, there's never a line for the women's bathroom. On the other hand, on the other hand, it is a little lonely. You go to a conference like Grace Hopper and everything from food choices to childcare to, I mean, they think of everything that a woman might want or need or like at a conference. And so you come to a place like OpenStack where there is an awesome women of OpenStack group. And it's a little different, most definitely. I'm fortunate enough to work have worked with people like Ann Gentel, who is just a shining star in the OpenStack community. And she's been really great at sort of pushing some of the women in tech initiatives, both at Rackspace and through the OpenStack conference where we have a women of OpenStack sort of unconference or meetup at every summit. So it has its plus or minuses. I think I agree with you completely that you kind of have to have a big personality to kind of stick out. I was so disappointed that there were only four women in the women of OpenStack deck. But if you look, I mean, in the conference hall, if you look at the keynote at the crowd, I mean, we're definitely a smaller number of participants, most definitely. Growing. We're growing. We're up to 10%. Hi, I'm Alex. I'm currently a tech writer for Rackspace. Sorry, it has to be a bit closer, doesn't it? Okay, so basically like I'm very new to OpenStack, I'd probably say I've been with Rackspace for last nine months. And previously I was also at Red Hat. So this is my first OpenStack summit. And thus far, my experiences with large groups of people have not exactly what I'd be called positive as a female. I was one of the few people that was asked by Red Hat to go to a university and talk about, I just, you know, meet people and talk about getting jobs at Red Hat. And every single student walked past me like I was furniture. And like, that's okay. They'd go to the guy behind me, Andrew Milestone, who didn't know the tech stuff, and he'd just send them right back to me. And every single person said to me, you don't look like you're meant to be an IT. Why are you here? And I was like, excuse me, this is my job. And what's been so amazing is having that experience was quite negative, I got to admit. And it was really quite disheartening that I was just considered furniture and people walked by me because I had lipstick and a little skirt. And coming to a conference like this and seeing there are women and it's really fantastic to see that there is an industry where it's growing. And there is a culture that's available that is open and where wanted, I guess, was a big thing. That was one thing that a lot of girls wouldn't approach because they didn't feel like they could. And that was really sad. So that's like, my big thing here is why I'm on this panel today is because I really want to encourage that because that was pretty uncool as far as I was concerned. So yeah. So my name is Berkaon and I've been in IT for way longer than I like to admit. And I've joined, I went, my first open stack conference was in Boston, which was I believe the third one. Yep. Yep. So I've been in for three years. And I am one of the authors of the open stack architecture book, one of 12 of us. And so I've been in the open stack community for a long time. And I have seen the growth of diversity in general and not just women diversity. But it's still a pretty geeky culture that's pretty uncomfortable with women. The statistics are good, you know, we're getting better at 10%. My first conference in Boston, I think I was, I think, I don't even think Ann was involved at that point. So I think I was probably one of three women in the entire hotel. You were there. I didn't meet you. Yeah, the sea of white American men. But the, you know, we now have open stack now has the internship program, which has been fabulous. I think 12 women have been through the program so far. And that has really encouraged people. And as others on the panel have said, you need a momentum. You know, when you're the only woman in the room for years and years, you don't really get that, you can't really get that momentum of the mentorship and really, you know, getting pulled along into the network because you don't really have that network. So I think many of us on the panel are really the pioneers. I guess Alex is getting the benefit of new. I think, yeah, one of the things that I would encourage is there are a lot of women in the room here is and the wonderful I missed it this week because I was asleep somewhere with jet lag. I didn't get to the meet up for the women on, I think it was Sunday evening. But we have to do a lot more mentoring of each other and networking with each other like those things. But even when we're in the sessions, when you go to the design summit and where open stack is actually better than most, I come from the Python and Django world. So I come from a world of an open source world where people are trained and they have codes of conduct so that people should behave and if they don't, we feel we can usually stand up and speak out if something untoward happens. But it's really, there's a lot of extra energy that as a woman in open stack or in any tech setting you have to expend in order to be heard. You have to take a lot of risks and stand up and say things and maybe argue a little louder for your point of view. And it's okay to do it. It's okay. But it's also it's not sometimes I see, you know, I have a and Nikki and other people have large personalities, but it's a risk that when you put yourself out there and in front of folks and we have to help each other when we're doing that. I think that's one thing we have to be careful that we don't over, you know, get talked over. I think that's one of the things that happens a lot is we get talked over. I just get louder when that happens most of the time. Well, for me, I remember I kind of crossed over into the mother role. And then people started listening to me. But when when I was younger, it was more of a problem. I definitely got a point on that probably being one of the youngest people I've seen here. Age is like is is a it's a big problem here at the moment actually because we're not really getting some young people and especially young women. And that's something I really want to work on as well because looking around like it's fantastic to see there's four women in a row here like that's amazing. And we really need to work on that and being a young woman is quite hard because a lot of people do judge you via your age like, Oh, you couldn't have any experience in tech like you just got here. It's like, Well, of course, I just got here. I'm prepared to learn and you've really got to stand up, use your voice and push yourself to go out of me to go through. And that's a that's a big uphill battle at the moment, I think. I have a story. This is this is when I was young. I went on a job interview and I brought a copy of my sample code with me. And the male person who was interviewing me looked at the code and said you couldn't possibly have written this. And I have always regretted that I should have at that point gotten up and said, I'm sorry, the interview's over. I probably would have had choice words for for that guy. Different to any age, I guess. You know, one thing I hear a lot and I just I feel like I need to bring this up, you know, everyone's hearing about women in tech and, you know, leaning and all this other stuff. And now it seems like there's kind of this counterculture of saying, Well, Oh God, another woman in tech thing. And, you know, one thing I think it's important to note is if I think if we're all going to be in this sort of together and if we're going to be successful and promoting women in tech, I think it has to stop being, you know, a him versus her kind of thing. And I'm seeing men in the audience nod. I mean, I can't imagine on the other side what it feels like to be a man whose stereotype is being like, Well, you know, you're a jerk to women at conferences and you make off comments and you, you know, you're a horrible person because you say things in passing that people over here. It's disheartening. I think there's the biggest thing that I've learned in the whole dynamic is that there's always a matter of intent. And I think when comments are made in passing, someone's not maybe necessarily intending to hurt someone's feelings or to make them feel bad in any way. But there's also the matter of the receiving end too. And so, you know, did you mean to intend to, you know, make somebody upset? No. Did you? Yes. And so on the other side of that, I think women have to be worth forthcoming and how they feel about that and address it right then and there instead of, you know, perhaps being angry about it and stewing about it and walking around all day being pissed off because somebody made made an off comment. And so my hope is that, you know, a women will speak up when they feel offended, but men should speak up when they feel offended too. And if someone comes to you and said, Hey, that comment really offended me, don't dig yourself in a deeper hole. Just say I'm sorry and move on. And I think most of the time, that's probably the easiest way to diffuse a bad situation. Yeah, I think there's without, without risk, there's no change. It's one of the things and you have to really take that risk to, to say when you've, when you've been offended or when you have offended to say you're sorry. There's, but I think there's a deeper problem that's not just an open stack or an open source or in tech in general, women aren't going into computer science anymore. So the internship programs, the things that we need to do to go earlier on to get younger people involved, we have to do more of that. To get the diversity of opinions and approaches to working on projects together, we need to have women in the room to make this project and others a success. And this morning over NPR, there was something, the new woman who's the head of the CTO of the White House brought it up again. But in 1984 and I graduated in 1980 from the University of Massachusetts, there were more women graduating in computer science than there are now. And boy, we've got a real deficit. I mean, to make, to get to 10% is actually showing that we're doing a pretty good job in open stack recruiting people and bringing people into the room. But there's a huge deficit coming forward with younger women and other, and we've got to do a whole lot more to make that, to make that happen. Well, so this feeds into the next question that I'd like the panel to address. And what are your recommendations for maximizing the diversity of development teams? Because I think that's part of the reason that many people and, and what benefits does that bring to the, to the development effort? Yes, this is just one word that ties in both of those statements is essentially like it's all about culture. It's all about the culture we try to exhibit to the world. Like one thing, my boss, Lana Brindley at the back there has always said to me, we used to work together, Red Hat too, has always said it's all about culture. And it's entirely true. Like I don't actually think I'd still be here unless I found an amazing culture because it, it's very daunting. And it's really great again to have these kind of panels. And this is the first time I really felt like this is a career I want to continue on. And I guess it's due to the culture. And it's due to the fact that I can come along to these kind of things and feel really welcomed. And then there's women and open stack staff. And I mean, that culture is down to all of you. If you leave from this conference and you say, God, it was a sausage fest. Do you really think anyone's going to come? Like honestly, people, if you just keep saying like, hey, really, like, you know, there was all men there, like, oh God, even if men say that, that's really, really not encouraging other women and other people to come to these conferences and be like, I'm going to meet new people. I'm going to really expand my horizons and go somewhere. So I guess that's definitely been a goal of mine. Although networking is hard, got to admit, if you go up to someone, they look at you like, oh, oh, God, you spoke. Get over it. Another culture that we may have to get rid of the when you speak to someone else possibly return. But yeah, that was definitely my big thing culture. Let's really work on this culture and keep it going and make it powerful. I think giving people an opportunity to have discussions like these is a really good step. And to create those relationships that they do with the women of OpenStack working sessions and the dinners and the internship programs. I think what you make those relationships, you know, it's always great to come back and see you and see you. And I think definitely makes for a better summit when you see people that you're going to join in a panel with. The OpenStack Foundation has been really great about that. I know that the Python folks, they have a, you know, a huge contingency at the Python conferences or open source conferences where the women of Python get together. And that's really awesome. I would love to see in the future that there's child care provided at conferences. I think that would be really awesome, not just for women, but for maybe men too. I mean, that's always a challenge. You know, my son's father still works at Rackspace. We both travel all the time. And sometimes it's, we have a conference that both of us need to be at or we have to be in different cities. And so one of us is always struggling to figure out what we're going to do if we have to hire a nanny or find someone. So little things like that, I think would be really great. I think, yeah. Is there a question? Go for it. So on the culture front, I've been in here as long as some of you guys too. And I've actually was shocked when I came to my first OpenStack conference in Atlanta and found so few women because when I was coming up, I was doubly in. It was 10%, but computer science was 30%. And the AAAI conferences and things like that had more women than we have right now. But the conference atmosphere is actually better than it has been for me in a long time. Where I find some of the most difficulty is in IRC, where people don't see your face, can't hear your emotion. How do we deal with the tone deafness in IRC? Because we're in that 360, 350 days a year as opposed to 10 days a year at the conferences. And that hurts an awful lot in keeping women involved. I have a funny story about IRC. If any of you know me, for many years I always used Python DJ, which is my Twitter handle in IRC. And I think a lot of people didn't know I was a woman. And so I would get into IRC conversations with people and they would make crack jokes, or they would say something inappropriate. But by not having a gender on my IRC handle, I think I actually got heard more. But it didn't help anybody else. So when I started with Red Hat, I started using D. Mueller. So my actual name in IRC versus what I had built up over Twitter. As I keep saying, the hardest thing is to take the risk to be visible and to speak up. And I speak up a lot on IRC. I answer questions. I hunt down things. I try and be visible and active. You'll see me mostly in the open shift world, not in the open stack world, but on IRC trying to pull people in and talk about stuff. The thing is to be who you are in IRC, to actually own that you're a woman. So they actually know that you're a woman. Because I think people don't see you. They see your handle. They don't understand that there are women in there. They don't even expect women to be in there. To add to that, I also teach at University of Phoenix online, which is completely online. So you have no idea who these people are. And one of the things that they train the teachers, the facilitators, is to watch your tone. And it's deeply ingrained to me now that I'm very careful whenever I'm online, whenever I'm communicating through a semi-anonymous medium, that I'm very careful to make sure that the tone is not aggressive. The tone is not aggressive in a bad way is what I meant. And not abrasive to other people. Because it's very, very easy to slip to, because that person is not sitting in front of you and you're not getting that immediate feedback from their body language, it's very easy to slip into some really abrasive communication styles. And I see that on the IRCs all the time. I think that goes for just digital communication in general. How many times have you sent a text message and someone calls you and is like, what the hell? Why did you say that? And you're like, whoa, I didn't mean it that way. So anytime you're communicating in a digital medium, I think you almost have to over communicate to get to your point across. And if there is someone who's aggressive, again, call them out. It doesn't matter if it's a man or a woman. If someone's saying something that's rude or abrasive, I would just make the point to let them know that that wasn't cool. But make it in a nice way. I mean, you don't want to get into flame wars either. I also think it's pretty strongly that you have to be visible. And if you have an IRC handle or you don't speak up, hiding in IRC doesn't help. So being visible is really the key. And the code of conduct that we use at the conferences should be applied in IRC. So if you're in an open stack or a red hat or wherever you are on IRC, the code of conduct that we hold ourselves to when we're in person is the same one we should be holding ourselves to in IRC. So I'd like to move into a somewhat different topic, which is what is the role of different people to encourage gender diversity and cultural diversity in the development efforts? I think diversity in general is what makes a successful project. So getting other people's opinions different approaches. We have great conversations in the design summit and other venues here at this conference where you can see people's different approaches to solving a problem. And if you don't have the diversity in those situations and if you don't speak up, we lose out by not having the diversity. So the role of women and other minorities and other approaches and other cultures in bringing that in makes it a better project and makes it a stronger project. So I think we're pretty inclusive. You just have to make sure you speak up. Nice one. Yeah, big time. Can you please read that, read that question to me again. I just want to make sure I'm answering it right in my head. You know when you've got an idea and then someone says something, you're like that didn't have to. Right. It's the role of different people in encouraging diversity in the workforce and in the OpenStack community. I'd actually say like the role of encouragement starts with your parents. If you are a parent, encourage your child to take up technology. I mean if they don't like it, obviously do not force them down the route just like you wouldn't force them to do ballet or football. But encourage them to enter into these new roles. I was extremely lucky. My father was an engineer, mind you. He's a bit disappointed. I'm not a civil engineer now. He's quite happy. I ended up in technology anyway. But that's a totally different era and that's a totally different story. Essentially like the encouragement and the role that people play all starts from the beginning, encouraging children to enjoy this kind of thing and don't like back to the cult. My whole thing in my brain is all about culture. Don't say to your child like oh like engineers full of men or you know tech is full of men and you probably wouldn't want to do that especially to young girls. It just it really turns you off. Let me tell you now I went to an all-girls school. I know all about being turned off the men's. I got that a lot. So I'd like to, so one of the one of the role models for me was my grandmother who was a teacher and she and my grandfather were a dual income couple in you know in the 1930s and 1940s. Then they had a nanny when they had my mother and that was she was really a role model for me when I was growing up which is ironic because my mother actually although she has a chemistry degree from Cornell ended up staying home and raising children and being very traditional. So I've always I actually sort of felt disappointed that she never used that degree and she told me many stories of discrimination at Cornell in the chemistry department. One of two women by the way in the department at the time. So I think what I say is you know I think us here you know the need to be role models to the to show that you know strong women can contribute you know on equal footing and you know and be successful. Yeah so I'm a stepmom of sharing two kids two girls 14 and 18 now and one of I know really sorry my partner and I we have our hands full right now but and my partner is a web designer. It does get better. It does get better yes maybe and I love them and they're wonderful and one was an amazing artist and the other ones are an amazing writer and neither of them are even slightly interested in getting into tech and I think part of that and and I feel it's really it's kind of heartbreaking but they've seen the struggles that both of us have had in getting degrees in computer science working in web design working in engineering and how hard we've had to work to get here and it's it's just it's kind of it's you know my dad's an engineer my mom's a nurse they both have higher ed degrees so I've I had really good role models and I thought we were really good role models for getting into tech but because they see some of the stuff that we've had to go through to get to where we are and how hard we work to get work to where we are I think they they get discouraged and they have no like we we offer them all the time here if you work on data entry on this database and help me design this for this project I will pay you like not lawn mowing and we get we try and pay them to do little bits and work for us it doesn't work no they'll they'd rather mow the lawn but I I think it's also what I have seen in the high schools and I'm in Canada up in Vancouver is horrendous the the high school IT programs and what they learn is like the other last year my 13 year old was in her computer class and they were teaching them how to use PowerPoint and this is a kid that writes chat books on Wattpad on her mobile device she's just an amazing writer she she could teach them how to install Linux on their machines so they have the skills but that's that's what's being taught in the schools and so one of the things that I think we we all really need to do is to go really early on into the high schools and start speaking up and and not do it in a way that um that trashes the teachers one of the things that I teach at Native Education College and this First Nations College at in Vancouver and it what I what I learned out of that experience is that it's not what you bring to the classroom but it's what you leave behind it if you leave behind um trashing the teachers skill sets and you leave behind programs that they can't then reuse there's a lot of it doesn't it doesn't go down well and you won't get invited back we we're doing I do a lot of work with the Coast Makers group people who do Makers fairs we do a lot of 3d printing and the Coast Makers and I are building a a traveling a trailer for 3d studio together to take to the high schools and to conferences and to maker fairs where we're going to print little mini-me action figures so you'll be able to do a full body scans so I try and really hard to incorporate that into my um my work play life and to my family life too but I think one of the the biggest disappointments for me and probably for any parent is when the kids say no I don't want to do that career you know that that career is too hard or that's not my interest but they still they get the skills but it has to go much earlier you should see my dad's face when I didn't want to go into joint existence so yeah I'd like to open it to the questions from the audience it's gonna can say on the front of encouraging people I mean I was reading a tweet sorry my voice is just shot um a tweet earlier this week from Brianna Wu um who was saying you know if you want to hire more women in tech take the effort follow them on twitter if you've only ever worked with other white dudes you're probably gonna end up hiring just another bunch of white dudes because in this 20 years in this industry I've never gone to a job where I didn't know someone there and you know take the take the moment to reach out to kind of look at the other people and and an expander um expander group and and then maybe start hiring some people who aren't all just white dudes I just want to like add to that point I come from a really great team at rock space and I'm really really lucky but I was hired because I knew my boss and my boss was hired because she knew her boss and his whole team was hired because they all knew him from separate jobs and that's a whole team of white males and it's it's a like that culture is entirely like that's fine they're fantastic employees but that just keeps happening happening it's cyclical we can't move out of this if we just keep hiring our friends we have to branch out and say hey wait a second that chick's pretty cool she's doing some school class I have no idea what she does what where she went to school anything but I'm going to try and find out about her and if just like one of you at any point in your life or in the next couple of years can just reach out to someone say hey actually you're doing some cool stuff do you know what I do I do open stack would you be interested in this we could end up with so many more amazing people other than the same people at different companies constantly because one thing I've noticed is you meet someone you're like hi I'm Alex nice to meet you and they say oh you know hi I'm so and so I use I work for X I used to work for X and you're like why do you have to introduce your last company and they're like oh what did you used to work for and it's like red heart and before you know it that person used to work with that person and that person used to work with that person and that person worked at that company with that person this is kind of incestuous networking networking indeed but we need to branch out if we're going to get women we need to bring them in because they're not here right now is my point so I'd like to add to that as her boss yeah with the networking stuff it's and I mean I'm you know a geek introverted type as well and it's really hard to put yourself out there and to go to user groups you wouldn't normally go to and to hang out on Twitter with people you wouldn't normally follow and that kind of stuff but it's the only way to get the diversity is to exactly and to pop out of your your own social circles is to is to yeah you put yourself out there and yeah I'm not saying like you know don't stop networking networking is the best thing ever but network outside your circles because we've got women but we're saying we haven't got enough so how are we going to get these women if we don't branch out we have to really break those barriers and get out there make a new culture you want to say something I just took a look at the get involved page with the open stack and seems to me if diversity is a primary goodness with this community there should be something that says we've got diversity groups here's where you can find a mentor if you're Chinese or if you're a woman I did notice on the on the get involved page there is exactly one woman listed in the mentoring list of people so that is not a good thing so yes I think one of the things we can do is is reach out to organizations that are stressing the different the different diverse groups for instance anytime somebody talks about having an open stack event in at least the bay area maybe in Seattle and other places are it's growing I say you know if you're gonna have a hackathon and you have a focus contact code chicks they're really into this and they love doing this but they don't know we exist and so we need to reach out to those organizations that are actually also encouraging and the need of Borg anytime somebody says well we want to do a hackathon and we want women and we want global women we need to know what the organizations are that are helping folks along besides ourselves and start networking with those guys too I agree good idea for a blog post for sure so we have a question back yeah at the individual company level it seems to me that hiring is expensive and the reason why networking is such a big thing because actually reduces the cost of hiring it's someone you know what obligation and that's the individual cost of hiring the next white guy that you already know is much cheaper than hiring going this extra mile to find this more diverse candidate or what obligation do you think individual companies have when it's actually costing the money to go this extra mile to find it what obligation do you think companies have to do that that's a great question I don't think you have any obligation because gender discrimination is illegal so but I will tell you that there was a manager in the United States right in the US at Rackspace Jim Curry who I credit is the original founder of OpenStack he's here by the way floating around he's been out of the scene here for the last year or so but he made all of his hiring managers interview at least one woman for every role and he's like look I definitely want you to find the right candidate but you have to interview at least one woman for that role and so it was it was great we actually hired quite a few women out of that process um if you break down sort of the the research behind diversity and inclusion in teams there's actually a really good business case for building diverse teams and so for him it was yes he wanted to help women in tech but he also knew that there was value in building diverse teams and so just hiring women for the sake of hiring women I don't want to be hired somewhere just because I'm a woman I want to be hired because I'm good at what I do just I'm talking about the intake problem right the idea that if you tap your own personal network you end up with the way the community is now not the way you would like it to be which means that the costs of getting that intake of the more diverse candidate stream compared to the current state of the community is extremely difficult and I'll add to that but on the the bad side of that if you only tap into your own network you're looking at your belly button which means that you're you're not getting the innovation and and the classic example is uh Detroit um the big three U.S. automakers in the 1980s were totally sideswiped by the Japanese and the reason was is because they only hired people um you know who were just like themselves and they would look outside in their parking lots and they would see nothing but GM and Ford and Chrysler cars and they never bothered to look past their belly buttons and realized that people on the east west coast and outside of Detroit were buying Japanese and German cars so it's the same thing you really you know adding diversity actually increases innovation because it increases your creativity and it pushes your boundaries in ways that you can't do any other way so I think the answer is is you have to push past that tendency to want to hire your clone yeah I think the money that you would lose by not having a diverse team like Farley gray or outweighs the the money that you would potentially save by just tapping a small network of people who are all alike next question so here's my question open stack as a community this is my ninth summit I've been here a little while seeing the community change and grow from before the foundation existed till now the foundation staff is probably mostly women probably a majority of women um the community is a meritocracy right we vote on who's elected we vote on who's on stage I feel like the future is in our hands we're not like beholden to some other group like we are the community right so give me some big ideas that we can all take back so that at the next summit it's not 10 percent like picon is 30 percent right so I feel like there's room to to go what are the big ideas what are we missing great question all right well funding I think I mean if you want 20 percent at the next one um scholarships travel funding specifically targeted at women um and minorities to get get people here the hardest what's that child care that was that was that's a huge one I I think one of the the hardest things is to um well the next one is in Vancouver so you all come into my house thank you very much so we're gonna have I I have a I have babysitters 14 and 18 year old babysitters they hate that I said that but um it a long story but anyways um I think one of the hardest things is to get the funding from and the budget from from your your companies especially if you're not a big company even at red hat it's you know sometimes difficult to travel to Hong Kong or to Paris or wherever it is and getting that so if you're really serious I would say double your budget for funding and target it at us and ask your boss too like you know there's there's always kind of a group in your company probably that's organizing travel budgets for the open stack summit you know if it's it's not something they offer just ask them a lot of times companies will be kind of happy to do that especially if you just ask I was just going to say if you're talking more about getting more women into your company and then eventually bringing them here is the way I got into things was an internship program and what Red Hat did is they tapped into the university I was at QUT and what they well they targeted specifically the creative writing students and that is probably about at the time when I was there was about 60 40 60 being women and so the interns that were hired at Red Hat were probably along the lines of 80 female and quite a number of us stayed and it kind of got to a point where when I first started as an intern at Red Hat there was a majority of men there but by the time I left we were taken over and that was all great and all of them came through from internship projects and some of them are here uh I know Deepdy didn't do the internship project but she was one of the women that was hired while I was there and that was really fantastic because it was an environment that she probably I'm just assuming here felt more welcomed into because there was other females there which was really fantastic and now she's here I'm here I know lots of other people at Red Hat that I'm still friends with Warner so that was a good way to get women into the idea of it women size t-shirts would also be nice oh yeah also like yes all right well t-shirts can we do singlets another question it's actually a little bit following on that um one of the things I think I've noticed is that there is there can be initial internship programs or an invitation to join a project or a sort of initial reach out but there's not a ton of follow through in the community as far as how to follow women past maybe their first couple months um and I actually don't think that I know a single woman who's gone through the internship the open stack women's internship program who's gotten hired except for one um two it was you you're one of them so uh at least that's you know from what I've this is observation and I actually did run the leadership the women leadership in open stack numbers um just for my own kicks uh for the Juno cycle and there I think of core reviewers in open stack there's 9.5 percent are women and of course we know there's one woman on the TC and she's also the only female PTL um oh now there's two um so I guess my my sort of larger um ask of the panel is going to be how do we get women to stay it's not that they're not showing up initially it's not that they're not getting invited to show up and it's not that there's not a kind of internal funnel that's trying to get them but they're not sticking around why is that why are they not sticking around um so they're students and they're not yet employable that's I mean but that's the tough one but that's true in general of tech you know there's big pipeline and women leave tech at a higher rate mentorship from my perspective I'm not a student um and I was hired as a non-technical person to start to help out with a an entirely otherwise technical team um and it's it's been uh it's very very difficult when you're in your late 20s or early 30s and you realize that you're quite and like relatively intelligent and have the capacity to go do a lot of different things and uh you have to go to conferences and talk to people and they don't want to talk to you because you're a woman or um well or they just like I have to get introduced to people to network with them by another man on my team because otherwise they think that I'm trying to hit on them I think or something um and it's it's incredibly disheartening and I think that there's only so much you can take before you're like there are so many other things I can do with my time I think it's emblematic of the of the entire tech industry though is that women come into the tech industry and they're bright and brilliant and excited and passionate about something whether it's cloud technology or python or jango or whatever it is 3d printing and we're really excited about it um but we and we put the effort in we do the internships we get there but we what what I see happening is that we don't want to put up with a shit yeah you know we could go in sorry uh we could go back um we could make more money and in a more include you'd never think banking in finance would be more inclusive than tech or open source it is it is and they you know people go up I've seen women leave computer science and go into real estate because they make more money they have a better career path and that so there's there's a this is a real thing that's happening is that we'll get people in and we don't continue to mentor them to stay with stay with them um and it's it's very what what we face in the the tech community um Gamergate and other things like when we stand up and we say something out loud um is is is a lot of risk taking and and at a certain point and and I and I really sometimes I get mad because people say women are dropping out because we're having kids um it's not because we're having kids we have kids in banking and finance and real estate and everywhere else we don't drop out um we give up and I do think there's you know I have a massive amount of respect I actually grew up playing the cello and so I had to put a lot of hours and time into that um in order to get good at it right and I I view tech is the same way um initially to get in you have to put 10,000 hours in or however many thousands of hours in and actually to continue to keep up with how things move you have to still put that time in and every time I sit down and go to do my python lessons I think about the last time I got treated badly at a conference or you know the way that somebody spoke to me that wasn't exactly right and and then I watched another male colleague totally get a pass on something very similar um and and it happens all the time to keep motivated and so I just want to encourage especially the men here to keep in mind that it's that kind of death by a thousand paper cuts and that any tiny little act of preventing one of those paper cuts um that you can do whether it's not asking me for the 18,000th time if I'm in marketing when you first meet me or um there are there are plenty of ways to be friendly and and reach out um and also to continue to mentor not just for a month when somebody starts but find them at three months find them at six months find them at 12 and you'll always lose people but it's important to follow through thank you so we have a question over here so can you hear me so first of all I wanted to share my uh my own experience with the being a woman in tech industry because I think it was a bit different than what I heard here so on the on one hand I could really relate to what you said about feeling like a furniture sometimes and I can I personally can't count the number of times that I was mistaken for the waitress and this kind of conferences yeah um but on the other hand when it really comes down to uh important stuff I never felt like I was discriminated either job interviews or uh getting a promotion or getting the right salary um and I really actually if I was discriminated was for the better because they prefer to hire a woman than a man I mean there were interviews that I know for sure it's my early career that I was accepted only because I was a woman so this is how were you actually paid paid more because I know for a fact I have consistently been paid less than my male colleagues by significant amount for many many years so for me I know you know to a certain degree but I know that quite for sure that I wasn't discriminated and um um this kind of a conscience between the two uh I don't know how to explain it because right now I am an R&D manager so I I have to recruit people as well and I'm facing a different problem because I really want to hire women but currently if I count the number of women that I have in my department there's still 10 percent and what I see that what I interview women and they are they have much more options and it's not so as I was saying I'm facing a different problem because I really want to hire women and it's really difficult because other companies are fighting over them because they also want this diversity and they want not not working the whole male environment because I mean let's face it it's not very it's much better to have women in your company so I'm not sure how to address this but yeah I think we're we're about out of time it's I think it's awesome that that that people are fighting to have women on their teams that's I think that's encouraging actually um it just makes me think that there's no problem with the industry or with the people it's just I mean the whole pipeline of how much women get out of college and go for software this is the problem or the certain type of companies the certain type of fields that they choose to to go like what you they go into finance by the way yeah and they go to larger companies because it's safer and it's more convenient to raise children and there's two startups where the innovation happens but yeah yeah and the us the us the the accounting and the finance department which and and is now reflected in the percentage of women's cfos is growing and very fast because they go into that department because it turns out women are really good at math I know it's people have now discovered this and finance is very lucrative you go home at night at five you have very you know it's very conducive to child you know supporting having children and you get to be a cfo if you're good at it so I think we have a at just one point I just want to make yeah it's just like we have to keep fighting the good fight on both sides men have to stand up and say I'm not this person that you presume I am and women have to turn around and they also have to say like I'm not going to put up with your shit on the other side of the story and this isn't going to change overnight and it never will and I think we have to stop thinking oh my god if we say something now it's going to change on the same token I think women need to stop thinking that all men are the same and that all men are going to treat women poorly or you know because you said something that offended me I'm going to think that everyone just like you is out to get me so there's a I think there's a victimization sort of aspect to it too sure there's truth and stereotypes sometimes but I don't I don't I'm not going to blame you because you know some other guy that is like you said something bad to me and so you know it's it's hard to hear the the stories of how women are treated it's I know how real it is and I know it's frustrating but I also think there's a good amount of men sitting in this room that are here for a reason and so thank y'all for coming and and doing this yeah along those lines I mean you're going to find out that everybody is being discriminated in some sense right it's it's the quiet male that's going to be lost in the crowd and his company also what I wanted to make two comments one is you know with the the numbers from 1984 versus today it's the same everything oscillates right just like technology you go centralized you go decentralized you've got all these trends and women will always make strides and then they'll stop making those strides and you just have to be vigilant the other thing was somebody talked about you know some of the strategies a great strategy just like saying when you interview people you need to interview a woman or diversity the same with succession planning I worked for a company that had a rule when you succession plan you have to pick three people and two of those have to be diversity because if you don't include them in the mix you're never going to hire them or promote them so one of the other strategies is like you said go to grace hopper conference go to a bi look at their strategies on how they get the funding and the inclusion thank you so I just want to thank you on the insides helping me understand why there are so few women in tech and my grandmother was a professor and university on mathematics so she was a great role model and I read about her struggles to and it was yeah I just like to call out a bias that I'm hearing here what I'm hearing in all this pipeline stuff is that the only way to be important in tech is to have a CS degree and I just heard the being called a marketer is insulting can we stop that shit agree by the way I do not have a tech degree I don't my degree is in Asian studies and languages I've been working in tech for 30 years and I'm a product manager now so on that note thank you for being in marketing and marketing all the good work that we do I think that's great I I think one of the things that marketing gets slagged for the only way in tech that you can be successful in marketing is to be brilliant and understand the work that the engineers and everybody else is doing and so I think the respect that women don't get for being in marketing is is a shame and at Red Hat we've got some incredibly brilliant people in marketing and in product management and other spaces that that really do make it happen and and by the way Verizon has discovered that women make fabulous sales people you can't sell it if you don't know what it is so thanks everybody for coming and so thank you yes